Members in the Media

"It's such a very complicated thing that's hard to explain. That's what everybody kind of laughs at. They're all impressed it's such a complicated thing and then they ask, 'What do you need it for?' "–Richard Steiner, NIST, on the electronic kilogram, The New York Times, October 16, 2005

"Even those of us who are doing these experiments usually just 'shut up and calculate.' But in our off-hours we do think about what it means."–Paul Kwiat, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, on quantum entanglement, The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2005

"I hope the next three or four years will be our golden age. There are lots of young [physicists] losing sleep looking for the next great thing."–Chris Quigg, on future discoveries at Fermilab, Chicago Sun-Times, October 21, 2005

"Many science professors aim only to produce more scientists when they teach. They teach to one-tenth of 1 percent of the students. That's not good for society. It's producing a citizenry that thinks of science as having no connection to their lives."–Carl Wieman, University of Colorado, on science education, The New York Times, November 1, 2005

"The land is really flat and there is a good network of roads. The night sky is dark and clear."–Pablo Bauleo, Colorado State University, on the Colorado site for the proposed Pierre Auger Observatory, Lamar Daily News (Lamar, Colorado), October 25, 2005

“I think they still may be ahead of physicists. I was amazed, going back to the 15th century, to see the appeals not just to a metaphorical spiritual world but to an extra-dimensional spiritual world.–Lawrence Krauss, Case Western Reserve University, on the fact that artists and writers thought of extra dimensions ahead of physicists, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, October 21, 2005

"It's not a trivial thing to do, build a dirty bomb. It's not simply a matter of tying a rod of cesium to a couple of sticks of dynamite and running away."–Benn Tannenbaum, on dirty bombs, Associated Press, November 1, 2005

"It's a disaster looming – a time bomb, say. The scientific community knows very little about it. It scares me a lot."–Gert Harigel, CERN, on chemical weapons dumped into the ocean, The Daily Press, (Newport News, Va.) November 2, 2005

"Is this a significant result? Is there an industry just waiting with bated breath out there for this? The answer is absolutely not."–George Whitesides, on a study of “microoxen,” microscopic algae which can be induced to carry loads, Boston Globe, October 31, 2005

"In my view, this was a singular event in the history of nanotechnology. It not only created a whole new field of 'fullerene chemistry,' it immediately made feasible the notion of making things from the bottom up, just as physicist Richard Feynman had predicted 50 years earlier."–Neal Lane, Rice University, on the discovery of buckyballs, Associated Press, October 30, 2005

"The existence of these molecules in interstellar space was considered impossible 20 years ago. Now, we know better.... As a class, they are more abundant than all other known interstellar polyatomic molecules combined." –Louis Allamandola, NASA Ames Research Center, on the discovery of nitrogen-carrying aromatic hydrocarbons throughout the universe, Christian Science Monitor, October 26, 2005

"The reason foreign governments would like this technology is if they reverse-engineer it, they can apply this to their fighter aircraft. If you do that, our air-to-air missiles don't work very well. They can't find the target."–Dean Wilkening, Stanford University, on stealth technology that hides US warplanes from enemy missiles, Honolulu Advertiser, October 28, 2005